Quoi qu’il en soit, les hommes ne sont même pas maîtres de leur propre volonté.
Apologies for the mess. At the moment, 3 figures are commanding my attention: the works of Moufawad-Paul, which I intend to read to completion and then go back through his work to take down as many citations as I can for future use, the works of Georges Bataille, which I've decided to dedicate my life to reading and re-reading, and Heidegger, the black magician. I started a new job recently and I've been spending most of this week grinding YouTube videos and podcast episodes to try to familiarize myself with the works and thought of Heidegger and Nietzsche. One of my professors is an expert in their work and she's recently printed me a couple of her papers to read, which I must confess I'm having difficulty with due to my own unfamiliarity with both of those thinkers. She print them for me because I sent her citations from Austerity Apparatus for her research project since Moufawad-Paul has a much more pointed materialist account of anxiety as opposed to Heidegger's. Some time in the future, we'll discuss them and I'd like to be better prepared. She also loaned out to me her copy of Being and Time that she read when she was an undergrad, it has her notes in it from that time period of hers. I must admit I'm excited.
I've decided to venture through a bit of Heidegger at her behest. The only primary texts of his I'm interested in engaging with are his Basic Writings in one convenient volume and Being and Time. As far as secondary is concerned, again only two books: one simply titled The Philosophy of Heidegger by Michael Watts, and one called Heideggerian Marxism, a collection of writings by Herbert Marcuse, who I only recently learned was one of his students. I've managed to find one book on Nietzsche that I'd like to read, I've already perused a bit of the first chapter, it's called How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche by Daniel Tutt. It's essentially a Marxist account of Nietzsche's work, demonstrating the anti-egalitarian and reactionary core of Nietzsche's philosophy which flows through all of his major concepts. The first book my professor loaned out to me was also a more or less Marxist account of Nietzsche's corpus, aptly titled Nietzsche's Corps/e, but I'm likely to read through Tutt's work before that one. As of now, the only works of Nietzsche I'm interested in reading are Thus Spoke Zarasthustra and The Gay Science but I don't know when I'll make time for them. There's also a book on Heidegger's political life in the university library but I don't think I'll ever get around to reading it. I don't intend on becoming a specialist in either Heidegger or Nietzsche, but they've been an interesting detour. My professor seems to be a woman struck by Nietzsche as if by lightning, but in one of our chats I mentioned that Hegel was the one who made a similar impression on me.
For Moufawad-Paul, I have a few more tasks to attend to before I'll have worked through his body of material. First, I have to read Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism, his most recent work. I also intend to read his PhD thesis, A Living Colonialism: Reconceptualizing Anti-Colonial Philosophy. Other than those two works, the rest that I have to get through is rather short. First, there's the introduction and first chapter to his abandoned work Torsion and Tension, intended to be a mini-manual for dialectical materialist philosophy but which later grew into his Demarcation and Demystification. At some point, I'll have to go back through Continuity and Rupture to read the appendix, Maoism or Trotskyism?, I might do that on campus one day when I have some time off. Lastly, I'll have to read his papers, of which I could only find three. This Ruthless Criticism of All that Exists: Marxism as Science, Radiating Disaster Triumphant: Modernity and its Discontents, and Quatermasters of Stadiums and Cemeteries: Normative Insurrectionism and the Under-theorization of Revolutionary Strategy. As of now, I still intend to upload citations from his works to this website after I've finished a first pass through his existing corpus, partly so that I have them easily available when I start school and have to write my own papers. As I accomplish this task, I think I'll start to come into my own. Somewhere in the beginning of his Critique of Maoist Reason he mentions philosophers in the service of Maoism and claimed that the best among them was Ajith, or K. Murali, a cadre of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). So, I've decided to read one of his books, Of Concepts and Methods as well as his critique of Avakianism, written during the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement period of the mid 90's.
Through reading Moufawad-Paul's work, I've come to accept what he calls the PCP-RIM sequence
as the chthonic origin point of Maoism, therefore I've decided that it would be pertinent to undertake a study of the Revolutionary Internalist Movement's unofficial magazine, A World to Win to witness the birth of the next sequence of our science. More than likely, I'll begin with the 1993 declaration Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the joint international declaration which first codified the position of the Maoists in a comprehensive and programmatic manner. As well as this, I'd actually like to return to the writings of the Communist Party of Peru, specifically the Interview with Chairman Gonzalo, the General Political Line and the Fundamental Documents. There's others I'd like to read but I think I'll have to make time to visit those writings when my Spanish is at a level of development where I could read the original sources effectively alongside a 2-volume history of their protracted people's war that's currently untranslated. Anything short enough during these travels I'll likely upload to Jampack Vol. 1 for others to read. There's also a book on Soviet political economy that I'll attempt to upload citations from alongside Fundamentals of Political Economy. A cross-examination of these two texts would provide a solid basis in Marxist political economy before my eventual study of Capital. Something, but I don't know what, has been compelling me towards a study of Feuerbach and Max Stirner. I think a reading of The German Ideology alongside Anti-Dühring will mark my passage into the realm of becoming a philosopher in the service of Marxism.
My French has been coming along well, I've almost finished Alice Ayel's series of videos, French the Natural Way on LingQ, but I'm still incapable of listening to or speaking in conversations effectively. It'll be a few more months before that's a possibility I think. Right now I'd simply like to finish her series to prepare the ground for an eventual return, get through the LingQ Mini Stories a second time (and hopefully listen to them in the Quebec French as well), and listen through as much as I can of the Inner French podcast, which will hopefully grant me a certain command of French to effectively read through some of the books I want to read. I think first I'll get through that double-sided collection of short stories I have and then try to read through For Marx in the original alongside my English translation. Then, I should finally be ready to read Alain Badiou's Theory of Contradiction, which I'll eventually attempt to write a translation of for this website. My hope is that eventually my French will be good enough that I'll be able to start keeping my physical diaries in French for the rest of my short life.
Through the blood pool, I have yet another detour. I've decided that I want to begin reading the works of Georges Bataille and make of him a fellow traveler. There's a couple books I want to read so we can get introduced, one simply called Georges Bataille by Stuart Kendall, then Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction from Benjamin Noys, and lastly, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism by Nick Land. As far as Bataille's works, the three I'm primarily interested in are Erotism: Death and Sensuality, the three volumes of The Accursed Share, and Inner Experience, at least as far as his theoretical works are concerned. I'd also like to read Blue of Noon along with his short book Literature and Evil. I managed to read about half of Visions of Excess, a collection of his early essays, but I was unable to finish it due to his persistently opaque writing style. I'm hoping perusing a bit of secondary will help alleviate some of the difficulties. As far as my interest in Bataille, I already see in him something of a kindred spirit, a failed communist born at the dawn of a new century drawn to extremities of violence and sex, plagued by visions of corpses, orgasms, and shit. I want to take Bataille into the 21st century so we can witness its brutalities and degredations together.